Re: men, elves, wolves, and robots; was: man, etc.

Quoting Sally Caves <scaves@...>:

> ----- Original Message -----
>
> > Quoting Andreas quoting Sally:
> >> In writings contemporaneous with Wulfstan's and afterwards, the term is
> >> wer/ver- as in NG Werwolf, also Wehrwolf.  Wulfstan's spelling is
> >> interesting and piques my curiosity, which is why I'm blatting on.  For
> >> instance: we have middle Dutch weerwolf, MHG werwolf, West Frisian
> >> waerul,
> >> Danish and Norwegian varulv, and Swedish varulf.
> >
> > Act'ly, a spelling reform of about a hundred years ago made the Swedish
> > spelling
> > |varulv|.
>
> I was quoting medieval spellings, Andreas, but this is interesting!
> Obviously to reflect pronunciation, right?
Sorta. Pre-reform, /v/ was, depending on position and etymology, spelt in a
variety of ways, incl 'v', 'f', 'fv' and 'hv' (I may be forgetting one or two);
the reform turn all these into simple 'v'. But a pre-reform spelling like |ulf|
was pretty unambiguous - native Swedish words rarely if ever end in /f/. Still,
the reform killed off a couple of homographs like |golf| /golv/ "floor" and
|golf| /golf/ "golf", as the former became |golv|.

I might have expected |warulf| or something of the sort in medieval Swedish, but
spelling wasn't very fixed back then.

> > This spelling reform managed to cause some phonetic splits; the (now not
> > much
> > used) cognate of "wolf" became |ulv|, but the men having it as their given
> > name
> > overwhelmingly retained the spelling |Ulf|, which soon enough acquired the
> > pronunciation [8lf]. We also got the doublette |alv| "elf" and |Alf| masc
> > name;
> > you also see |alf| with reference to beings in Norse mythology.
>
> Yes, indeed.  So are you saying that with the change in vowel pronunciation
> that the names Ulf and Alf threatened to become confused with one another?
No - I'm saying they split from the normal words |ulv| and |alv|, since the
names started to be pronounced with final /f/.

> That would be something!  Forgive my asking what [8] sounds like.
[8] is a mid-hight central rounded vowel, on this list perhaps most famous as
the first element in Trisan's pronounciation of the English /ow/("long o")
diphthong. To my ears it sounds alot like [u\] (high central rounded), but
that's as much due to Swedish phonology.

|Alf| is simply [alf] - quite distinct from |Ulf| [8lf].

                                                    Andreas